In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist Read Online Free PDF Page A

pale
yahudi
with their crazy Jew hats—the flat, furry ones, the tall black ones, too many kinds. He breathed in and caught a whiff of potatoes and sweat and old clothes. If only he could move his head so he wouldn’t have to keep looking at them, but his stupid cabbage head refused to turn, was stuck always looking over his shoulder, at others. They were staring back at him, too, while they squeezed their hairy chins or twirled their long side locks growing out of their ears.
Ya’allah
, he groaned. When would the driver give the signal to get off the bus? Why was he doing this, going to Ninveh Street to find the Jew Isaac Markowitz? But he knew why.
    From the moment the Jew had looked straight into his eyes and said the word
kohein
, strange things had been happening. One night, the
yahudi
’s address fell straight into his dream, just like that: Seven Ninveh Street. Then the next day, he peeked over the big Jew wall and had seen a powerful sight: Jews acting like his Muslim brothers. With his own eyes he saw them take off their shoes to pray! They stretched out their arms and fingers from under white shawls and rocked and sang a strange prayer. He crept over to a big-bellied policeman who stood guard at the Gate of Magharbeh. He pointed. “Please, sir, what are they doing down there?” The Israeli gave him a what’s-it-to-you look but leaned over the ledge to see for himself. Immediately he smacked a hand over his eyes. “They are koheins,” he wheezed. “It is forbidden to look at them when they say that prayer.” Mustafa gaped. Even this brazen Israeli sinner showed respect for the kohein!
    Most strange of all—he was passing through the souk and he saw a dusty postcard on the ground, near the Gate of the Cotton Merchant. He turned it over—what a noble-looking man in fine white garments! On hischest sparkled many colored stones, and on his head he wore a pointed shiny cap. Tiny gold bells and pomegranates hung from the hem of his loose robe. And there at the bottom of the postcard he read: The High Priest, the kohein. Kohein, kohein, kohein. When the curly-haired tour guide on the mountain mentioned kohein to a small group, Mustafa nearly tripped. Everywhere he turned, the word was coming at him. All this, he concluded, was a sign from Allah.
    The driver nodded his head at him and Mustafa eased himself off the bus onto Kings of Israel Street. He tried to get his bearings without his tools to lean on.
    “Which way to Ninveh Street?” he asked a scrawny man in a black coat hovering over a newspaper as if hungry for all the bad news in the world.
    The man pointed a skinny white finger and said, “Go left at the luggage shop,” then went back to his newspaper. Mustafa rubbed his right shoulder, which always ached from the extra weight of his crooked head. And if he happened to forget about his head, others reminded him. Just this morning, while he’d been eating his lunch, he spotted two workers near Solomon’s Stables who were playing some kind of game. Maybe he could join, too—the foolish thought crossed his mind—and he came closer. They were walking sideways, he saw, a head twisted over the shoulder. They kept bumping into each other and falling to the ground. A hot knife of shame went through Mustafa. He looked away, but then he saw the imam cover his mouth, as if to hold back a chuckle. Even the imam. The knife went in deeper. Would the Jews also call him
moak
—Twisty-Head—the way they did in his village and everywhere? His face darkened and he staggered on, moving sideways, sighing to himself. Well, maybe not all Jews. Maybe not the Jew Markowitz, at least.
    He tilted and listed past a small grocery with boxes of candles out front, and then, after making a left at the luggage shop, clomped along the street with its rows of cottages and low apartment buildings. A stout woman with meaty arms stood on her balcony flogging her carpet as though it were Satan. The smell of fish baking, the singsong